Roger Ebert Can’t Talk, Eat or Drink; That Hasn’t Shut Him Up

Sept. 13 (Bloomberg) -- Since July 2006, Roger Ebert
hasn’t been able to speak, eat or drink. He takes nutrition
through a tube. Surgery for a tumor in his lower jaw
eradicated the cancer but also led to the loss of the jaw.

“I would describe my condition,” he writes in his
memoir, “Life Itself,” “as falling about 72 percent of the
way along a timeline between how I looked in 2004 and the
thing that jumps out of that guy’s intestines in ‘Alien.’”

As the jokiness suggests, Ebert isn’t prone to self-pity. Why should he be? He’s led a charmed life. Growing up
in Urbana, Illinois, he fell into journalism when a
friend’s father invited him to cover high-school football
games for the local paper. He became a movie critic when a
higher-up at the Chicago Sun-Times called him into a
conference room and informed him that was his new beat.

The thumbs-up, thumbs-down TV show with his rival
Chicago movie critic Gene Siskel was also someone else’s
idea: “I had no conception of such a show and no desire to
work with Siskel.” At the outset he was lousy at it, too.

But he was always a go-getter. He had a knack for
interviewing, and the book includes entertaining
reminiscences of Lee Marvin, Robert Mitchum (a favorite),
Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, Ingmar Bergman and Werner
Herzog. These anecdotes come later on, though; the first
half covers his childhood and youth.

Chicago Newspapers

Much of it is Proustian, not in richness of texture or
sharpness of observation but in sheer mass of detail. “I
remember everything,” Ebert says, and, alas, he does: The
book’s most serious flaw is his occasional inability to
distinguish the fascinating from the mundane.

The world of Chicago newspapers brought him into
contact with Mike Royko, Eppie Lederer (her pen name was
Ann Landers), Nelson Algren and Studs Terkel. A lot of
liquor flowed in that world, and Ebert writes frankly about
his alcoholism.

He took his last drink in 1979: “Unless I go insane
and start pouring booze into my G-tube, I believe I’m
reasonably safe.” He married late but happily, after he
sobered up.

He writes most affectingly about Gene Siskel, who died
of cancer in 1999 after they’d spent 23 years “linked in a
Faustian television format that brought us success at the
price of autonomy.” Their onscreen tension “was not an
act”; before working together they’d been “professional
enemies,” and emotionally they stayed in a state of
“permanent feud.”

Like Brothers

But somewhere in their transition from local talking
heads to national celebrities, they accepted that they were
stuck with each other, and at that point, Ebert writes, “He
became less like a friend than like a brother.”

One thing they didn’t talk about was Siskel’s cancer:
“That’s how he wanted it, and that was his right.” Though
Ebert doesn’t say so, it appears as though when he got sick
himself he looked to his late partner for the model of how
he didn’t want to behave.

He got “a jolt,” he writes, from the full-page
photograph that accompanied a profile of him in Esquire
last year. “But then I’m not a lovely sight,” he goes on,
“and in a moment I thought, what the hell, it’s just as
well it’s out there ... I didn’t need polite fictions.”

Not only doesn’t Ebert feel sorry for himself; he
convinces you that, for everything he has had to give up,
he’s still living a charmed life.

“Life Itself: A Memoir” is from Grand Central (436
pages, $27.99). To buy this book in North America, click
here.

(Craig Seligman is a critic for Muse, the arts and
leisure section of Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed
are his own.)